Equality by lot

“Everybody wants to have a hand in a great discovery. All I will do is to give a hint or two as to names.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a letter coining the word anesthesia, November 21, 1846

The assembly ended, a few delegates lingered. They’d spent four days deliberating on the Los Angeles City Charter. Real people, chosen by lot, wrestling with real questions about how their city should work. Now they wanted to stay involved. One of them asked, simply: what do you call this? She didn’t just mean the assembly. She meant something larger.

It stopped me cold. We’d just completed the first charter reform assembly in the United States. Los Angeles: four million people, the largest American city ever to host such a body, had given ordinary residents an official voice in rewriting the rules of their own government. A small group of voluteers I’m part of spent years building Public Democracy LA (PDLA) into an organization that could help make something like this happen, educating, organizing, strategizing, advocating, recruiting, training. Then the charter issue dropped in our lap, and RewriteLA, a new coalition, formed to generate momentum for an assembly on charter reform. PDLA ran two charter mini-assemblies (December 2025 and January 2026) and the full assembly followed in February–March. Four days across two weekends, twenty-six hours of deliberation, moderated by Healthy Democracy, with an assist from PDLA. A landmark.

And we still didn’t have a word for it.

This matters more now than it did five years ago, because the movement, well-established internationally, is finally moving in the United States—the democracy most in peril. Assemblies are mushrooming across the U.S.: Petaluma, Deschutes, Montrose, Boulder, Fort Collins, L.A., Culver City, Decatur, Akron, Raleigh, several in Connecticut, and elsewhere. The infrastructure is being built. The model is proven. Healthy Democracy, F.I.D.E North America, Of By For, Sortition USA, PDLA, PAD, Unify America, The Assembly Project, Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, YOUnify, COCAP, CADA, NCL, CNDP and a growing network of practitioners and activists are carrying the work into new cities and new contexts. What was once a fringe idea entertained by political theorists and ignored by everyone else, is becoming something practitioners can point to. We did it. Here are the participants. Here are the recommendations. Here is what democracy looks like when you give it room to breathe.

And yet we keep tripping over the name.

Those of us in this community have made a kind of peace with sortition. We know what it means. We know its history, its mechanism, its logic. But it names only lottery and not the system of governance lottery makes possible. It says nothing about deliberation, or representation, or the political body that emerges. Ask a hundred educated people what sortition means and perhaps five will know. Deliberative democracy is better, as is civic assembly and its variants, but they’re both two words, and the crucial one, naming the selection mechanism that distinguishes them from every other form of civic engagement, disappears entirely. Neither does what democracy does. Neither conjures a whole system in a single breath.

I am an anesthesiologist. My specialty has a word because Oliver Wendell Holmes decided it needed one. Weeks after Morton’s first public demonstration using ether at Massachusetts General, Holmes wrote him a letter. The procedure had a name, etherization, but it was clumsy, and it focused on the agent rather than the state. Holmes proposed anesthesia. He was a physician, a poet, and a Harvard professor, and he understood that a discovery without a proper name was a discovery that couldn’t fully travel. His word stuck. It has been spoken, as he predicted, by the tongues of every civilized race.

I am aware it takes chutzpah to coin a word. Holmes had the advantage of being Oliver Wendell Holmes. I have the advantage of having been in the room. Here, then, is my hint as to names.

The word is allocracy. Rhymes with democracy.

The derivation is clean. Allocracy comes from the verb to allot, to assign by lot or chance, combined with the Greek kratia, meaning rule or power. Allot traces back through Old French to a Germanic root that also gives us lottery. The word describes the mechanism exactly: political power distributed by lot, to citizens drawn at random from the population at large. There is a secondary resonance. The prefix allo in Greek means other: rule by others, by people outside the political class, by those who didn’t seek power and aren’t beholden to those who fund it. Accidental, perhaps. Apt, certainly.

The alternatives don’t work. Klērotocracy is etymologically rigorous and utterly unpronounceable. Lottocracy and sortocracy both echo autocracy. Disastrous near-misses, particularly in conversation. Allocracy sidesteps the problem. It sounds like democracy, which is correct, because it is a form of democracy. A deeper form, the Athenians might have argued.

You cannot build a movement around a term that requires a seminar to explain. Every minute spent translating vocabulary is a minute lost to persuasion.  The work is accelerating. Reformers are watching what happened in Los Angeles and other cities around the world. Funders are paying attention. So are journalists. Legislators are beginning to ask questions. Everyday people are getting more and more curious about alternatives to elections. This is the moment, if there is one, to put a name on the thing we’ve been building. Let us define one new word and be done with it.

The delegate who asked me that question after the LA assembly deserved a better answer than I gave her. She’d spent four days doing the work: deliberating, listening, changing her mind, helping craft recommendations that went before the Charter Reform Commission. She wanted to carry that experience forward. She needed a word.

Allocracy. Government by allotted assembly. Try it. It fits.

Filed under: Applications, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: bible, democracy, History, news, politics |